Posted by Jack Garrett on March 18, 2012 at 12:48 AM
After seeing all the horror stories on here about failed hard drives, I finally decided it was time to back up my 2TB link station NAS with about 39,000 photos on board! Well, a couple days before the blessed event, the drive gave me a strange message....it's a network drive with a raid 0 so the info is spread across 2 drives...not mirrored. It said I needed a firmware update and also said had some bad sectors. LOng story short, something went very wrong and the firmware wouldn't update and now it says I have ZERO (0) mb of data out of 2TB!!!!!
The only possible option I have is to pull the 2 drives and try to use UFS Explorer to try and recover them in raid format. Anybody ever try this and did you have any luck? If so, please let me know.
Thanks,
Posted by Russ Shugart on March 18, 2012 at 11:09 AM
Jack, I've been in IT for 27 years. I'd be very carefull at this point. Firmware controls how the drive talks to the platter where the data resides. Firmware updates gone bad, power loss or something like that, typically will screw up your ability to see data but the data is still there unless you start writing anything to the drive including "initializing" or "formatting" or any other of the terms that the drive manufacturer uses to describe writing to the drive.
Bad sectors on the platter mean that there are spots on the platter(s) that when data is written to, it fails the re-read test. You used to be able to map out bad sectors so that the drive doesn't try to write there again. This in general is not really a good sign as this could mean real loss of data. You're probably going to get all kinds of advice on this and this is just my two cents, but I'd take it a data recovery service and not mess with it any more as you might really lose data trying to fix it yourself.
Here's what I do in hopes of never losing data. I have 2 external drives connected to my computer. I copy everything, unprocessed pictures and processed, to both of these so that each is mirrored. About every 3 or 4 weeks I copy one of these to a external drive I keep in my fire safe at the house so that all my stuff is in 3 places. I also have a 4th drive in a safe deposit box (off site) at the bank. About every two months I take one of the 2 drives I have attaced to my computer down and swap it with the safe deposit box one, bring that one home, delete everything on it and copy the good one attached to my computer to it. A whole lot of copy time but the thought of losing anything scares the crap out of me.
Good luck! I hope it all work out. I feel for you!
Posted by Scott Bideau on March 18, 2012 at 2:45 PM
Jack, very sorry to hear about this. Unless those 39,000 photos aren't very important, I second what Russ says about getting a good recovery service (and that probably isn't Best Buy, but rather a corporate/enterprise offering).
Even though this advice won't help you now, it could help others in the future: Never, ever upgrade anything unless your data is backed up. Microsoft Service Packs can go awry, a bad firmware upgrade can brick a device, etc. I won't even upgrade my iPhone OS unless everything is backed up. Backing up your data takes a while, but it's a "go to lunch operation" (can be done while you're not at the computer). On the other hand, trying to recover data without a good, verified backup can be a "go out of business operation."
Good luck with the recovery effort, Jack. And one you do get things restored (hopefully), consider an online backup service. My system consists of mirrored RAID setup on the PC, two 1TB external hard drives (one of which is always disconnected and powered off) that I alternate monthly, and online backup using Mozy.com for a very reasonable price. Nice thing about Mozy is that it backs up new material automatically, so no matter how lazy I get backing up images on the external hard drives, my newest additions are always safe.
Posted by Bill Pelzmann on March 18, 2012 at 11:22 PM
Ouch! I can relate to the sickening feeling when you get one of those messages. Best wishes for a complete recovery.
In my case, the original hard drive was trashed while in the process of making a copy to a new drive. Only 10% of the files made it to the new drive, and the original was never recovered. I had CD and DVD backups, but you can imagine, it is one PITA copying a TB of data from from optical media. Of course, the alternative would have been far worse.
So, I fully agree with the others above, THREE complete copies would be the minimum amount of redundancy that I could live with. Compared to the cost of disk recovery services, the hard drives are super cheap.
I had a forensic firm retrieve a failed hard drive two years ago. It took a while but they succeeded. They emphasized a point noted above - any efforts rto retrieve or even repeat efforts to turn on and off can do permanent damage.
Discussion
5 repliesThe only possible option I have is to pull the 2 drives and try to use UFS Explorer to try and recover them in raid format. Anybody ever try this and did you have any luck? If so, please let me know.
Thanks,
Bad sectors on the platter mean that there are spots on the platter(s) that when data is written to, it fails the re-read test. You used to be able to map out bad sectors so that the drive doesn't try to write there again. This in general is not really a good sign as this could mean real loss of data. You're probably going to get all kinds of advice on this and this is just my two cents, but I'd take it a data recovery service and not mess with it any more as you might really lose data trying to fix it yourself.
Here's what I do in hopes of never losing data. I have 2 external drives connected to my computer. I copy everything, unprocessed pictures and processed, to both of these so that each is mirrored. About every 3 or 4 weeks I copy one of these to a external drive I keep in my fire safe at the house so that all my stuff is in 3 places. I also have a 4th drive in a safe deposit box (off site) at the bank. About every two months I take one of the 2 drives I have attaced to my computer down and swap it with the safe deposit box one, bring that one home, delete everything on it and copy the good one attached to my computer to it. A whole lot of copy time but the thought of losing anything scares the crap out of me.
Good luck! I hope it all work out. I feel for you!
Russ
http://www.AlpineGallerria.com
Even though this advice won't help you now, it could help others in the future: Never, ever upgrade anything unless your data is backed up. Microsoft Service Packs can go awry, a bad firmware upgrade can brick a device, etc. I won't even upgrade my iPhone OS unless everything is backed up. Backing up your data takes a while, but it's a "go to lunch operation" (can be done while you're not at the computer). On the other hand, trying to recover data without a good, verified backup can be a "go out of business operation."
In my case, the original hard drive was trashed while in the process of making a copy to a new drive. Only 10% of the files made it to the new drive, and the original was never recovered. I had CD and DVD backups, but you can imagine, it is one PITA copying a TB of data from from optical media. Of course, the alternative would have been far worse.
So, I fully agree with the others above, THREE complete copies would be the minimum amount of redundancy that I could live with. Compared to the cost of disk recovery services, the hard drives are super cheap.